[ColorForth] Arbitrary precision math?

[Jack Johnson <fragment@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Frank Kujawski wrote:
> The chalange with these problems is to find a trick to help factor the
> number.  After the procedure is found, then the implementation can be
> done.

I'm not thinking of the RSA Challenge itself, but the problem of doing
lots of division with 1024-bit numbers in Forth.

My initial brain burp was to convert the number as a series of bits stored
as bytes, and then building a "computer" to process the "bits".  Though
it's insanely wasteful of space, as Chuck says RAM is cheap, and I want to
believe (though I haven't tested it) that shuffling around bytes will be
faster than doing the math to shuffle bits through the chain.

Either way, it doesn't seem very elegant.  I was just wondering if anyone
else has any interesting ideas, or has seen or done any work with values
that neither scale nor fit comfortably in the realm of traditional Forth
numbers.

-Jack
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